Dig It

There’s going to be another Project Digs.
Digs The Third, as it were.
Triply Dug.

Tentatively Saturday January 20th and Saturday January 27th. These dates will be confirmed soon and then you’ll be reminded of them with confounding regularity.

If you’re not familiar with Project Digs you can check out my little web page from the last Digs at http://josiemorway.com/digs/



To sum up briefly (because you can read the whole dang mission statement at the address above) Project Digs is the large group show that I have been organizing, with the help of a lot of energetic friends, in Providence since April of this year. It's a show of artwork, projects, plans and undertakings of various sorts. Really various; from sculpture and painting to floorplans and installations and performances. The conception of Digs (and the implication of the name) springs from an interest in the living/working space in which most projects are hatched and executed and loved and battled. Our aim is to close the gap between making work and showing work by bringing art and dialog into a variety of these living and working spaces-- be they apartments or cubicle farms-- and away from the traditional and sterile world of galleries and museums. We hope to open up wide discussions about how we live and work, how we seperate and segregate the spaces in our lives and their purposes, and how we might reclaim public space and shared environment for more creative, productive purposes.

Even more importantly, we seek simply to bring artists of all sorts together; to talk, share ideas, and start new collaborations.

While we've shown lots of completed projects and fantastically finished works of art, I'm always interested in showing "in progress" projects, leaving room for discussions of process and potential.



Project Digs 1 took place in my house, a three story Victorian split into apartments of different sorts on Providence's West Side. Digs 2 took place in a rehabbed house further south, which was completely empty, restored, and for sale. Half way through planning the show we learned that the house was being sold as condos and that while initially described as "affordable", they were actually not. This led us into a small whirl of controversy and good conversation about gentrification and so forth. Also it was so hot and humid during Digs 2 that I died twice during the hanging (I guess someone always dies when there's a hanging) and a third time on opening night.

So now, for contrast:
Digs 3 will take place in a recently rehabbed, big, beautiful, January-cool home for sale by the Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Association in South Providence. If you’re not familiar with GENS, you can check out their website at www.greaterelmwood.org (Also I made their website. Score.)




GENS mission is to “revitalize neighborhoods by transforming under-served urban places through rebuilding livable neighborhoods, community assets and resident opportunity.” Essentially they’re a major local player in the fight for neighborhood improvement without gentrification, safety without sterility, evolution without moving towards anonymity. Also they make honest-to-goodness affordable housing (which they sell through an ingenious lottery system, with restrictions that guarantee any apartments rented in said houses remain affordable). I have also heard an insider rumor that they might be working on a bike advocacy program that would make bikes part and parcel of affordable housing, which would be fab if it were to come to fruition.




The GENS house will offer us more space than ever to show our work, as well as a great opportunity to meet with people who are keeping our neighborhoods livable for everyone, including... like... us.

There will be a theme, albeit loose and bendable to your whim, for this Digs. The theme is "Place".

Make of this what you want.
The theme of place comes up, rather obviously, because Digs has always been about place, and because we've never defined a theme before and I think it'll help the cohesion (or accentuate the divisions) within the show. Consider however you wish: Place and space, home, work, neighborhood, mental space, urban place, public square, breathing room, cell reception, source, bedtime, punctuation, gaps, gasps, blinds and finds.




I do not want this to automatically be a conversation about gentrification or environmental politics (though if that's what you want to talk about so be it). "Place" is an integral component in artwork in many more subtle and fascinating ways, and it's being examined and toyed with by infinite, ingenius troublemakers worldwide ("worldwide" is also a good word about places that should go in my list above. Like between source and bedtime.) The idea of place and space is of contant concern to so many artists who want to examine and redefine either our entire relationship to our physical environment, or simply the place of art and artmaking within that environment. See some sweet links below.




Bring it on.
Consider this a call for artists. If you are in the Providence area, or would like to get yourself and your work into the Providence area, contact me and show me what you've got. We will offer a generous amount of space to each artist who shows... we don't want to see isolated singular pieces of finished art, we want to see bodies of work, ongoing projects, obsessions and innovations. Show me show me show me.



I also welcome (demand and whine for) feedback about the show planning as well as the theme.
.............................

Here are some links to get you started thinking about place in a loopy and penetrating way:
GlowLab
Especially this Glowlab article
Also maybe you should read something about Psychogeography
Dig some strange maps
Or if you're into Brooklyn

..............................

"Place for me is the locus of desire. Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people. I fall for (or into) places faster and less conditionally than I do for people. I can drive through a landscape and vividly picture myself in that disintegrating mining cabin, that saltwater farm, that little porched house in the barrio. (My taste runs to humble dwellings nestled in cozy spaces or vulnerable in vast spaces.) I can walk through a neighborhood and picture interiors, unseen back yards. I can feel kinesthetically how it would be to hike for hours through a vast “empty” landscape that I’m dashing through in a car - the underfoot textures, the rising dust, the way muscles tighten on a hill, the rhythms of walking, the feeling of sun or mist on the back of my neck. " -Lucy Lippard, from The Lure of the Local

Muttering about mattering and charged with change.

So, have you looked at these quotes that were left as comments after my last posting? Major props to the reader (who I don’t know, which is awesome) who laid these sweet selections on me.

Standout line from therein, for me, is the wickid simple following:

"The challenge for the artist is to search for the good and make it matter..."




It’s not even the “good” that is operative for me in that quote (though good is good and I’ve always wished to find a way to do it), it’s the “matter”. To Make Things Matter seems a worthy charge for anyone… maybe the only really worthy charge I can think of. This idea could share a room peacefully enough with my recently discovered idea that artwork could be justified as, at the least, a plea for increased attention. To small things and large, innanimate and warm, geological and intangible. I’d like to be part of the brigade that marches for mattering.

Further: Wim Wenders, whose name and films are also coming up a lot in my recent conversations (and therefore whose stills are littering this entry), has been quoted as saying that a film that makes people believe that change is possible is a film that is worth making. Dig it, Wenders. Hope someday I'm bold enough to say: an artwork that makes people believe that mattering is possible is worth arting. Gah.




This idea, that art might give a viewer the idea that things can change and that it matters (or that things matter, and will change) brings me a long way from where I was when I started this blog and felt entirely devoid of justification for art. Not to imply that I’m all edified and illuminated and now wake up clear of head and mission and have no doubts. But we’re getting somewhere, yes? Maybe someone viewing my work-- or any work for that matter-- will get a tiny, important inkling about transformation by viewing the evolution of a surface, or suss out something about scale and stamina and about who or what is watching them and the relevance of a few words that have been stuck in their heads.



Still…

Speaking of change, does anything ever?
Our directorial friend of the unusually pronounced, alliterative name is probably talking, in the quote I mentioned above, about the kind of change that involves regimes and rights, hunger and honor and horrors. Being just a small nub of a thinking person, and having just spent the long thanksgiving weekend revisiting several very, very long-gone, crucial characters and places from my past, I guess I’m thinking about change in the lifeliving, personal sense. Change and un-change in personality and instinct and strength and dynamics and my own persistent, undeniable retardation. Being visited by the past makes me aware of how much my life and the world has changed, if precisely by illuminating the ways in which I, and that same world, have not.



The morning after one such visit, this weekend, I woke and went on a bike ride. I’d been rocketed for a night back to the time when I first came to this city—and now in daylight Providence looked different. Or, I should say, the city looked profoundly like itself to me in a way that it hadn't in quite some time. The port's ships were such tankers, so steaming, saltside and iron. The stacks were smokey and the architectural variations had names and sat on hills, and out of the blue I truly knew where I was in a way that I hadn’t in quite some time. I was looking at things in the way that you look at things when you are into making art and you think “I must make it so that everyone can look at things in this way: like they matter intensely”.

And I was so grateful to my visitor for reminding me of this way of looking and also I looked familiar in my pants and also my books looked like they were supposed to on the shelves. Like someone had wiped a glaze of hustle and bustle from their spines and I could savvy why I’d put them there in the first place.

There is a Same that things must Stay to if they’re to be - and have ever been - what they’re meant to be. There is durability, and there are things you’ve always known and are perhaps sometimes in danger of forgetting. I am not sure, in the end, that I want to assure a viewer or reader That Things Can Change, or That Some Things Are Immutable.

On the other hand of the defying-time's-erosion clock: There are other things that, despite the really shocking evolution of my life in the past decade, I am not so glad to find the same.

I just spent an evening sitting next to someone I’d been missing for over five years— and so quickly during that evening I fell back into a kind of silent understanding and subtle hinting and flailing hoping and enough unspokens and unspeakables to sink an invisible ghost ship. Our cups runneth over with quiet. Everything was as loaded as a tortilla chip about to break off into the onion dip of history.

And I do not like being unspoken, unspeakable, dipped. Unspeaking and broken-spoked. I have changed much and I have been away but here was this person, and with him here was this familiar feeling of choking warmth and lonely wonder. Jeez. But I thought… But it’s not… It’s still just like it ever was. I can still be, in a word (two), hopelessly young.



I now have no idea whether anything changes. Except for muscle mass, area codes and the delivery systems that candy manufacturers use to gimmick up the old standbys. You can get butterfingers in the shape of potato chips now and my thighs are strong but maybe this does not signify anything.

I am thinking about what I should have said as I sat next to the old friend who I was so glad and disturbed to see (so glad and disturbed, in fact, that I opted to use champagne in order to see THREE of him because if there is one thing that stays the same it is this defective—undeniably retarded— decision making mechanism in my drinking head).

It would probably simply be "Welcome Back".




And I’d whisper it to you from this close range,
where everything’s altered, but nothing is changed.

They Asked Me To Talk

about my work at the DeCordova the other night. And before talking it seems I primarily took photos of my friend Brian. I'll have to insert a photo here of him rather than of me, which is just as well seeing as my right eyeball chose that night to undergo what I now understand to be called a subcutaneous hemorrhage, the white filling up with red, red blood and causing people to respectfully avert their gazes from me all night. Gore.



Giving the talk made me nervous (even though I thoroughly believe that to be nervous about one’s own performance is to give one’s self way to much credit for being important. I mean, I’m a small thing and I matter but in the end, so what?) I made notes in outline form beforehand, four pages of bulleted lists which I carried with me. I consulted with people more experienced in public speaking, confirming that almost anything is a better place-filler than the word “Umm”. I hoped that that included the place-filler of throwing up in one’s own mouth.

In the end no tragedies or digestive anomalies befell me while I talked, though about two minutes in I found myself wondering what would happen if I just fell flat on the floor (wondering in that same way that I sometimes wonder about what would happen if I put my sweater sleeve in the stove’s gas flame. It’s a form of wondering that is a definite warning of impending experiment).



While speaking I spotted a woman (later confirmed to be a museum employee) who was grinning and nodding her head and even popping her eyebrows in various expressions of delight and surprise, so I looked at her the whole time. When I was finished my best friend Stacie wept and squeaked out “I’m just so proud of you”, which made it all worthwhile for me and gave our other friends a good laugh. All around it went fine, it went fine.

Aside from the joy of making a cute girl cry, there were two distinct and important things that I got from the Night of Talking Out Loud. One was a little more insight into my own process and aim, and one was some sweet thoughts about materials.

When figuring out whattheheck to say, the biggest challenge was to figure out why I paint birds. I ended up talking about my transition from painting people to painting birds, explaining that I’ve always been interested not so much in narrative painting but rather in the suggestion of narratives where Lots of Information is Missing. To paint not the narrative painting but the tiny detail of a narrative painting that one might see in an art book, where you can tell that there is a story going on but the detail is taken so completely out of context that you can’t tell what the story is.

I explained that I’d found that the human form, no matter how ambiguously posed or obscured, just inherently gives away too much information, and that I’d turned to birds because they still offer expressive body language, gesture and posture but without the overwhelmingly familiar human characteristics or identities. I mentioned my long-standing desire to make a painting that would affect the viewer as a snippet of overheard conversation affects a listener.



I’ve never been entirely sure what I mean by these things, but it’s starting to become clearer. I realize that although I feel like a fairly astute observer, I still feel like I’m constantly bombarded by fragmentary information. I think this is the way most of us go through the world, only partially absorbing and understanding the torrents of story and stimuli around us. That our stories consist more of holes than of plot lines. And that’s the primary thing I’m interested in and, probably, painting for; to examine the way we pass through and take in our world, communicate and don’t communicate with it and with each other. Maybe, as I meant to claim in my talk but forgot to because one page of my notes stuck to another one and went un-taked, my work is at its very least a plea for increased attention (to, you know, the small species, small victories and small lies).



There are other things about birds which I discussed. There is their special role as Most Visibile Wild Animal Ever, going on with their going ons amidst and amongst us, in broad daylight, observable. Yet they’re simultaneously some of the most elusive creatures ever, fast and above as and able, in that awe-striking and unstoppable way of theirs, To FLY. There is the way they seem to be observers themselves, and always to be watching us. There are other things too.

Following my humble success at not throwing up, James Grashow, the maker of the 100 monkeys, spoke. And he was an absolutely amazing speaker. Performer, even. He gesticulated and provoked and built a big robot out of cardboard and I think he even made it speak about mortality. Stunninng. His primary topic of discussion was material, specifically cardboard, and why he’s so drawn to working with a non-precious, mundane material.

“It is not like Bristol Board, saying ‘oh, I’m so perfect and precious, make precious art on me’” he said, “cardboard says ‘I’m trash, I’m yours!’, cardboard is just thrilled for you to make anything out of it”.



This is something that really speaks to me, and I think he’s got a great attitude. Something has always turned me off about the white and flawless materials manufactured exclusively for Art. I’m figuring out more and more just why it is that I’m so attached to painting on ratty, splitty, knotty and hole-ful plywood. It is a material that is of the world, it is a building material, we walk on it and past it everyday. It has history and utility and splinters. Umm. Splinters of overheard conversation.

I like showing the baseness and simplicity of the material, but there is also something to be said for transforming it and transcending it.

In addition to his rustic, swinging monkeys, Grashow also had a piece in the show that was so intensely refinied and detailed that the fact it was made of cardboard is almost unacceptable. It is a scene of marsh birds and flowers, leaves and feathers all tooled down to miniscule exactiture and mindful minutae. When showing this work he said:

Well, you know. Often you want to make something that causes people to say “I could totally make that!”. But every now and then you want to make something that makes them say “Whoa, I definitely couldn’t make that!”.

How true man, how true.

Now I am Thinking That It Is The Small Things

I’ve been painting this one bird, the woodpecker, with its head thrown back in a Certain Way. It’s a way not at all pleading nor swooning. It is proud, maybe a little awed. It is a little odd, reminiscent of the ecclesiastic. And out of the blue I find myself certain that this particular bird in this particular pose is declaring, sure as sugar, its importance and validity. It’s saying that it matters.

And who would I be to deny it? There is something about the bulge of the hearty chest and the swerve of the vulnerable, vigilant neck that just says “I am as valid and permanent as any mapped geography, as relevant and crucial as any democracy, any biography”. Suddenly I’m painting a clear argument for the importance of the small species. And this is something I’m happy to doing.



I’ve always been concerned with conservation and the depletion of species, dismayed at humankind’s (including my own) ability to underestimate and ignore the ecosystem around us, the crucial struggles and victories of the non-blogging, non-speaking, smaller earthdwellers. Remember? Clear-cutting and decimation. Night sweats and extinction.



To reconnect with this concern feels natural, and there comes with it the hunch that there is even more to it: it is all the small things that are powerful, not just the feathered and deforested. Small things matter, and small things count, and so on ad infintesimal, and this is not a particularly wise epiphany, seeing as there are, I think, a few dozen trite books written on the theme and titled things like “Everything I Need to Know I Learned While Looking Up My Own Nose in the Mirror”.

I’m just saying that right now it feels like it is the small things. And that, if I’m going to respect the importance of small species, I might also respect the importance of small efforts, like the artistic efforts that I’m always belittling as I search for something huge to do. In the end it’s the small teeth that build the dams and it is the small lessons that bring the roof down. It is the small lies that get me out of bed in the morning, hot on the trails of a louder life. Everything counts.

Goings on about the striped room.

Here are some studio shots, in lieu of extensive studio thoughts.
I've gone wood shopping at last and, after extricating the gigantic splinter that bisected my palm's lifeline during the haul home, covered just about every wall and leanin' space in my house with in-progress pieces.

There is something to be said for immersion.

A few years ago I had a dream. In it I was working in a studio where every surface, including the ceiling, was covered with chunks of imagery. Fragments of representational paintings, words that seemed to be snippets of conversations. I felt absolutely right in that room, and felt like it was a microcosmic echo of the feeling of walking down an unfamiliar street- filtering the stimuli, overhearing the chatter, glancing at the powerlines. I'm pleased to find that my now-studio is beginning to feel like the studio from that back-then dream.

Of course, later in that same dream I dreamed that I used some sort of unusual, witchy powers to turn a porn magazine into a big club sandwich and started eating it, all meaty and made of lady parts as it was. Then I began to panic, realizing that to be a true vegetarian I probably ought not eat human thighs and asses. (Please give me some credit for not ending that sentence in the way that I could have.)

Anyway, here's what is here, now...

This guy is still floating around and almost finished:



This guy is barely sketched out:



There is a heap of words, waiting to arrange themselves over your head in an ambiguous speech bubble:



There is the beginning of a woodpecker, swooning and important:



Here is a barely legible close-up of a crow's wing:



There are things on my wall for inspiration:




God. The colors of these walls.